Thursday, October 14, 2010

Focus on crime, not on cop

It caught a lot of people off-guard. A police officer, even a suburban type, facing criminal charges for a series of shootings (with one person killed) along the Illinois/Indiana border.

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The suspect may look sort of like this

﻿What wound up surprising even more people was when, after spending a weekend in a county jail with a $2.5 million bond that put him in the same category as the most violent of criminals, prosecutors were forced to admit that their evidence wasn’t quite so solid.

THAT IS WHAT caused bond for Brian Dorian to be reduced to personal recognizance (meaning he is trusted to show up in court), and why on Wednesday the charges were dismissed.

Dorian, who has been a police officer in suburban Lynwood and Lansing but has been on leave in recent months due to a shoulder injury, is now a free man. His family and friends are all worked up into a frenzy about how he was singled out for abuse that no law enforcement officer should ever have to endure.

Municipal officials in those towns were eager to believe that a mistake was made – even before the Illinois Victim Notification System made its formal announcement Tuesday night that the case against Dorian was too flawed to continue with.

Go looking around the Internet, and it becomes easy to find comments from people (mostly anonymous) who view this whole situation as one where “liberal freaks” were too eager to pin the blame for these crimes on a white guy as part of some agenda to undermine society as we know it.

NO, THIS DOES not make any sense. But then again, neither does 99 percent of anonymous Internet commentary.

Actually, the Internet factors into the Dorian case. Because the reason given by prosecutors for dropping the whole case was that Dorian’s alibi “checked out.” His alibi was that he was using his computer to check out the Internet.

He claims he was doing exactly what many of you are doing right now. Which means that investigators in Will County eventually checked that computer, and found that he really was on the computer at the time that one of the shootings took place.

Since prosecutors are convinced that all the shootings in this particular burst of incidents occurring down where the Chicago area meets Indiana were committed by the same man with a Colt revolver (a weapon they have yet to recover), it means they have to clear Dorian of everything.

WE’RE NOW GETTING a lot of sarcastic barbs about stupid cops who don’t even know how to check out an alibi before seeking criminal charges. Barney Fife does Joliet (as opposed to Lake County, Ind., where officials never sought charges against Dorian for incidents occurring there, and where sheriff’s police now say they never thought Dorian did it).

The end result is that Dorian – whose family these days tosses out hints of some sort of federal lawsuit seeking compensation for having to spend the weekend in jail as a suspected criminal – probably is going to go through the rest of his life thinking of himself as the victim.

I will be honest. That bothers me.

It’s not that I think Dorian deserves to be persecuted (although if he ever works as an active police officer again, I would hope he retains some sense of what it is like to suddenly be confronted by armed officers threatening to take away his freedom).

IT’S JUST THAT in thinking about these shootings, I really don’t want this to become the story of a police officer falsely accused of a crime – which is what it has all the potential in the world to become.

I want an arrest of some type to provide a sense that police actually have put a halt to the person who thinks they can go bopping back and forth across State Line Road; shooting people who happen to arouse his anger.

The big reason that Dorian was arrested was that one of the people who was shot (but managed to survive) in these incidents picked a picture of the officer out of a photographic lineup, then out of a physical lineup, although the legal "experts" who are merely talking heads whenever broadcast news needs someone to speak are now saying that the physical lineup was tainted by the prior picture lineup.

Now, that person likely has his testimony tainted to the point where nothing he says will be acceptable. That is, presuming that an arrest of any type is ever made again.

WHICH MEANS THIS has the potential to become yet another unsolved crime. It will become all too similar to those shootings two years ago at a Lane Bryant store at a strip mall in southwest suburban Tinley Park.

We’re still waiting for something resembling an arrest in those incidents. Too many people have had to just accept it mentally that the Lane Bryant incident that left five women dead may well become one of those crimes that someone “gets away” with.

At least Dorian’s own attorney told reporter-types Tuesday night that we should be “concerned” that the string of shootings remains unsolved.

Let’s not forget that the real victim in all of this is Roland Alonso, a 45-year-old construction worker who died after being shot Oct. 5 while working with others to rehabilitate a home near Beecher.

1 comment:

I hate the thought of this cop getting out and celebrating with his family it make me sick. Did the two witnesses pick the same guy out by coincidence I think not. I belive this Dorian guy is guilty as he was in previous years when he crashed and killed a 17yr. boy. Someone is definitely helping this killer out. Further more, I could tell you what sites I go on everyday on my computer too who's to say a family member wasn't on the computer. There's something really wrong here.

I am a Chicago-area freelance writer who has reported on various political and legal beats. I wrote "Hispanic" issues columns for United Press International, observed up close the Statehouse Scene in Springfield, Ill., the Cook County Board in Chicago and municipal government in places like Calumet City, Ill., and Gary, Ind. For a time, I also wrote about agriculture. Trust me when I say the symbolic stench of partisan politics (particularly when directed against people due to their ethnicity) is far nastier than any odor that could come from a farm animal.